Brain Food . . .

from Hannah Arendt's "Labor, Work, and Action" (and it figures that I'd skim over the labor part and zoom straight to the more personal processes---the two "remedies" I haven't been very good at these past few years):

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of forgiving, and the remedy of unpredictability is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two remedies belong together: forgiving relates to the past and serves to undo its deeds, while binding oneself through promises serves to set up in the ocean of future uncertainty islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would ever be possible in the relationships between men.

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.

Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to achieve that amount of identity and continuity which together produce the "person" about whom a story can be told; each of us would be condemned to wander aimlessly and without direction in the darkness of his own lonely heart, caught in its ever-changing moods, contradictions and equivocalities. . . . In this respect, forgiving and making promises are like control mechanisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes.

Jolly Morbidity

So can anyone tell me why this year there's an overabundance of huge cha-cha-ing Santa Clauses in restaurants, in the middle of malls, and even in (ironically enough) Sports House? Does it have anything to do with the (supposedly successfully hurdled) fiscal crisis, and our need for symbols of affluence and (Western) generosity? Or is it simply the novel idea of one manufacturer who decided to supply bigger companies with affordable but moving (as in mobile) Christmas decorations?

Whatever the reason, I get mildly disturbed when I see the hyper-jolly, sometimes life-size Santas moving their hands up and down like Biomen mecha-clones (or mecha-gaigons?) in sinister slow motion.

* * *
My ex-boyfriend's brother, who eventually became the best man at my brother's wedding, just had a baby, who died last Friday. Last night, we went to the wake of one-day-old Aaron Luke (nicknamed Zack).

Elmo asked me how the dynamic of a wake changes when it's that of an infant. Because instead of commemorating a life, people are mourning the end of a possibility. And it's true. Last year I attended four wakes (Lola Evy's, Lolo Molina's, Manang Tilde's, Jowell's mom's)---all of which were rather celebratory, overflowing with food, with people chatting lightheartedly, as we Pinoys tend to do even in the direst situations.

But the scene in one of the smaller box-like rooms at Loyola Guadalupe last night seemed tense, almost surreal. For one thing, when we arrived, neither the coffin nor the immediate family (save for the parents' three-year-old daughter) were there. Friends and relatives crammed on three church benches were faced with a white wall and an empty white table, with no food, flowers, or forms of distraction. The conversations I overheard were halting, and full of questions. Where were they? How long should we wait? Why did the baby die? The woman beside me, who was seven months pregnant, caressed her tummy. An hour later, the preacher announced the family would be delayed because the baby's grandfather had been rushed to St. Luke's and was now in the ICU. Then he handed around small photocopied sheets of paper, which contained the diagram of a heart and the following text:

Hypoplastic Left-Heart Syndrome. A serious and usually fatal form of congenital heart disease that affects about one to two newborn babies in every 10,000 live births. The baby is born with a poorly formed left ventricle, the aorta is malformed and blood can only reach it via the ductus arteriosus. At birth the baby may seem healthy, but within a day or two the ductus arteriosus closes off and the baby collapses, becoming pale and breathless. There is no effective surgical treatment for the condition and most affected babies die within a week.

Two : ten thousand.

Minutes later, the parents arrived, and the service started. The preacher said, "I am no stranger to death," and proceeded to enumerate people he knew who had died this year. Thankfully, somewhere in his spiel, he addressed the gravity of the situation. He said there are three things we don't know: 1) why this baby was taken away; 2) what his talents and abilities would have been; and 3) what impact he would have had on the world. But that there are many other things we do know: that he was planned for not just by his parents but by God; that he is now in the arms of God in heaven; that he was and will always be loved by his entire family and God.

Earlier that afternoon I was telling someone that sometimes I wish I still believed in a God. Because I envy the sense of comfort faith used to bring, because I don't want randomness to be the only option, because sometimes I still want to invest the explanation in someone, who may be an illusion or just another construct.

But I do believe that some experiences need the sacredness of ceremony. If a religious wake helps people acknowledge their loss, provides a proper venue for mourning, and gives them strength to move on, then it can't be anything but good.

* * *
My brother stayed over until long past midnight, when the baby was cremated. He told me this over lunch today at 1:30.

Fact: it takes four hours for an adult man to be fully cremated.

Fact: it takes less than one hour for an infant to be cremated.

When it was over, the man handed a white letter envelope to the parents. Inside was a small plastic bag that contained the infant's ashes.

The infant's ashes fit in a white letter envelope.

Here is the Game, and Here is the Cycle

(Warning: long entry)

It's been three weeks since my last update. Yet no matter how long the intervals are between entries, the dilemma remains the same: what and how and how much to say, without being too revealing or cryptic or self-indulgent or trivial. And it only becomes a dilemma because I've chosen to write memoir-like fragments here instead of poems or critical commentaries or jokes, to make the connectable entries in Connect the Dots distillations of my life.

On some days, though, I'm still that schoolgirl with her mother's sapphire ring in her skirt pocket, choosing not to wear it on her finger not just out of fear (of it being confiscated by class officers tasked to implement the no-jewelry policy) but also out of the belief that the source of luck, the source of happiness must be protected from the prying, reductive eyes of the world.

* * *
I was so happy last night. Partly because the last Cynthia Alexander gig I'd watched was ten months ago pa, at 70s Bistro, after reading "Ped Xing" at Bersona. And it's been ten months of emotional tumult since. At Conspiracy last night, though, despite faint pangs of sadness when she sang "Ghost" and "Motorbykle" (and the funny thing is, I was unexpectedly seated beside one of my ghosts, and Allan had just told me something motorbykle-related that, whether true or not, cracked a still-fresh old layer of my heart), I felt like I was at graduation. My own. Or at least it felt like what graduation should truly be---a joyful ritual, shared with others, celebrating the achievement of having passed through something and having learned.

So when she belted out, "Don't lose yourself in anyone" (my favorite part of the drum-happy "Walk Down the Road"), it felt less like a scolding than a friendly reminder of a lesson already learned. And when she sang, "So we dance, oh dance . . . Hold on fast to living, for those days are long gone," it sounded like a blessing. On her third Joni Mitchell song of the night, I sang along at the top of my voice with other people around the table, which included Elmo, Allan, Larry, Maita, Anina, Miguel, Minelle, Kai, Missy, Mookie, Kokoy, BJ C., and Heidi. "I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet." Even at 5 a.m., after six bottles of beer and New York fudge ice cream and joining in a group conversation that meandered from solitude to siblings' sex lives, my heart was still doing steady pirouettes.

* * *
I've redecorated my cubicle, now with a Before Sunset theme: tacked on my corkboard is the Before Sunset postcard with the ethereal Julie Delpy on it; taped to the wooden desk and the wall behind me are pictures of landscapes (Stonehenge, Calgary), objects (the Dumaguete swing) and people (Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh's doctor, and an anonymous father and child) swathed in golden sunlight; between these are pieces of pink and yellow marbled cardboard with lines of poetry I calligraphed in blue ink, such as:

. . . a woman straightening
a desk turns her calendar to another day, signaling
that it is another day where the desk is concerned
and that there is in her days what doesn't belong to the desk
---Robert Hass, from "Natural Theology"

Egay's interpretation: even without looking at the content (of the lines) and aesthetics (of the layout), the very act of my redecorating screams out, "Something has changed and I want people to know!" And that what's most telling is not what's been added, but what's been kept (like the pink lampshade) and what's been removed (like photographs of certain people whose images no longer have power over me).

I suppose Mama's redecorating and cleaning bouts during my childhood did leave a few ideas ingrained. Those bouts weren't just about beauty and cleanliness. They were about letting internal shifts be reflected on the surface, about not allowing things to stagnate, and especially about making room for more good while holding on to the old and valuable.

* * *
The Tapatan reading with Egay last Thursday was a fun, if small, affair that affirmed not only our separate poetic journeys but our friendship as well. No other friend has been as constant and non-judgemental, quietly looking out for me. Conversations with him flow, even after a month of not having updated each other.

While it's comforting to talk to someone who knows almost all the narrative threads of my life, it's also thrilling to be able to tell these stories to new friends (and to retell them to myself as well), with all the necessary or unconscious revisions and reframings. There's a passage by Barthes (from A Lover's Discourse again) that talks about this narrative bliss:

Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: "This is what I am." This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding---I am light.

* * *
Ron threw Adrienne Rich lines at me two weeks ago at Cantina. And he was right. These past two weeks have been about finally looking up after reading the poem, about not losing momentum like the underground train, and about running up the stairs towards a new kind of love my life---or my faulty judgement---has not allowed.

* * *
I had a dream the other week, which Vince called a good omen. The details are fuzzy now, but it involved people (from the department!) wanting to imprison me, other people helping me to escape, and my having the ability to fly. I was about to soar out of the window (of a room that looked strangely like the Summit editorial office) when I saw a worker with a name tag that said "MOG" (name has been changed to protect the dream character's identity, haha).

I said, "Hey, I knew a MOG once. Don't you have a friend or co-worker with the same name?"

He answered, "Yeah, actually. MOG ___. He works in the boiler room now."

"Can you call him, please? I haven't seen him in years and I've been wanting to talking to him!"

"What guarantee do I have that you won't fly off and disappear when I go to call him?"

I replied, "I promise to wait here until he arrives. I give my word that I'll stay here, that I won't fly off."

And the dream ended there, with the promise.

* * *
A bunch of us spent a quiet, companionable morning reading and writing at Picnic Grove, Tagaytay last Monday. Taking a break from Jorie Graham, I brought out my favorite summer book---Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, which I hadn't read in years---and was particularly struck by a passage, among others, in which the 95-year-old Helen Loomis says:

I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It's essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind, which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much to talk about, but we must save it for another time.

The time was 10:15 a.m. and, while my mind was groping for a sentence that was merely declarative, I looked up and around, and saw: a kid near the railing with orange clips in her hair, blowing bubbles; the man selling bags of pink and turquoise-colored cotton candy, wearing a faded black Pantera t-shirt; mothers grilling pork barbecue, its smoke wafting towards us and other sheds and tables; Bible-wielding people, some of them wearing malongs, listening to a preacher trivialize Ecclesiastes by saying, "Lahat ng karanasan natin paulit-ulit lang, parang mga estilo ng damit"; and a charming red, blue and green kite flying high and strong---which, only minutes earlier, had gotten stuck in a nearby tree's branches but was lovingly disentangled by its flier (I refuse to say "owner"; nobody "owns" a kite).

Today, I feel like that kite: relieved at having survived near-catastrophe, grateful at being held steady and grounded, yet joyously buoyant, paradoxically free.

* * *
My answer to Anina's old question: I refuse the false dichotomy. I choose burning, with the intention of lasting.

Sem Break Snippets 2 *with Before Sunset spoilers*

* * *
A quote from Larry, now traipsing about in Cebu: "There's love and there's painting. And we have only one heart." (Degas)

* * *
I don't remember when I first watched Before Sunrise. But I do remember watching it once at the house of my high school love who, despite liking Julie Delpy, got bored and fidgety at the meandering, cerebral conversation. I wanted to finish the VHS tape, but the tugging at my shoulder wanted basketball or something else. I should probably have taken that as a sign that things would end badly. (There's only one Friendster request I've outright rejected. If erasure were an option---where's Lacuna Inc. when you really want it?---I would erase all memories related to that ex. Even a whiff of Cool Water still makes me want to puke.)

* * *
So the English department gang watched Before Sunset, uh, before sunset last Thursday, after a foiled visit to the Gaudi exhibit at the the new Ayala Museum. I still feel slightly uncomfortable walking around in Greenbelt. Maybe it's because I associate it with my first day of work---during my first photo shoot at one of the stores, I was asked to buy coffee for six at Starbucks. Or because I remember the ex-mentor-turned-stranger who would crave for General's Chicken at Cafe Metro. Or because there are traces of the old me who once told Armand that she felt awkward in "expensive" malls around "sosyal" people.

* * *
My sister and I went to Shangri-La on her day off to shop for slacks (to add to my sem break loot: countless kikay products, foam-encapsulated dumbells I HAVE been using, blue suede sneakers Elmo helped me pick out). She said all the members of her college barkada, whether married or not, now have at least 2 children each. Not that she's giving in to pressure. She's 31, a successful network honcho, and is attached, with no urgent desire to get married or have kids at all---which my parents don't understand and even disapprove of.

Despite our obvious difference in career paths, I feel I've (unconsciously?) modeled my life after hers. I talk like her (in that exaggeratedly articulated way EJ mimics and makes fun of), have always wanted to get out of our parents' house (she moved out at 25), have neurotic tendencies (one of us is OC, the other manic-depressive), and am cynical about religion, among other things. Like marriage. We agreed that our reluctance to settle down emotionally may be partly because we don't want to end up tethered and resentful and joyless like . . . but that's worth another blog entry.

I do remember our fabulous version of Balki Bartakamus' Dance of Joy: a Congratulations dance where we'd link our arms and whirl about furiously, as if our stomping could scare away the cockroaches laying eggs under the double deck in our old room.

* * *
Ethan Hawke's character explains that his book's ambiguous ending is a test: if you believe that Jesse and Celine do keep their promise to meet in Vienna in 6 months, you're a romantic; if not, and if you think the entire idea was ridiculous in the first place, you're a cynic. But what if (to reverse the formulation) the reader is a reluctantly cynical romantic who knows she's not feminist or religious or even constant, but is still attracted to possibility? How would she shape their narratives?

* * *
He later admits he may have written the book as a way to find her. And she admits that reading his book and seeing herself as a character filtered through his consciousness is both flattering and disturbing. Flattering, because he still cherishes the memory of her; and disturbing, I suppose, because she has to confront an idealized nostalgic image of herself which hasn't evolved in 9 years, and over which he has power. His, after all, is just one (though officially published) version of events.

(What about all the people I've written about/to in my poems? How do they really feel about being inscribed, though disguised? I remember a well-meaning request once, which I later had to override: "Ayokong maging tula.")

* * *
One of my favorite parts of the movie is the car ride, during which both characters' masks finally rupture with honesty: hers with anger and bitterness ("I was fine until I read your fucking book!...Being alone is better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely"); his with such despair, when he talks about his 4-year-old son and his wife ("I don't love her the way she wants to be loved").

His dream---of touching Celine's ankle while she's pregnant in bed---reminds me of that tender scene in Lost in Translation, when the unlikely couple are sleeping next to each other with so much space between them, and Bill Murray reaches out to tap Scarlet Johansson's ankle: their most intimate point of contact in the movie.

My other favorite parts are also "Lost in Translation moments". Like when Celine extends her arm in the car as if to touch his shoulder, then retracts; or when they wordlessly walk up two flights of stairs and she steals glances at him with the cat in her arms. I like the unsaid, yes, the ellipses and parentheses. The loaded silences and witty banter, after all, are only dances of delay---delaying his plane flight, delaying a constructed closure, delaying the inevitable "What now?"

* * *
The waltz she sings and plays on the guitar, though a bit amateurish, balances the movie out: it begins with his novel, it ends with her song. The uncomplicated chords and casual tone belie her wistfulness, their urgency.

(What is it about waltzes that make me happy? The 3/4 time signature? Even the cascading melancholy ones, like Elliott Smith's "Waltz #1"---which I love so much it has to be played at my funeral---make me want to dance. Which reminds me, I must listen to the CD Ron lent me, of the Vienna Boys' Choir---performing Strauss waltzes!)

* * *
Despite the cheesy commercial tagline ("What if you had a second chance with the one that got away?"---blech), I liked the movie. I got to tag along with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy to the cafe (though I wouldn't have minded staying longer at the bookstore), eavesdropped as they flirted in the park and the boat while I watched joggers and people fishing(!) by the river. Paris is beautiful, even for us vicarious tourists.

I have to admit---though I hate the adjective and think it's been overused in blurbs for poetry collections---that Julie Delpy is luminous in this movie. A bit weathered, but still lovely. It's her long stretches of casualness, punctuated by sharp mood swings, that propel the dialogue along. I barely even looked at Ethan Hawke (a feat!).

So the "ending" parallels that of the first movie. It had to; any definite closure would have been disappointing, too pat, robbing us of the chance to fashion the narrative after our own temperaments and fundamental options.

So what do I believe? I believe they're both tired of pretense, but responsible enough to let go of previous attachments amicably (yes, despite his kid, who deserves to have happy, if separated, parents), and wise enough to know they have to begin anew (not with the 9-year-old images they have of each other in their minds), and brave enough to do so. Though it's less belief than it is hope.

I think it was Michael who said, over kinilaw and sisig and spicy prawn chicharon, that if we give up on Jesse and Celine then we're giving up on ourselves.

So here I am on the other side of the screen, wishing them all the luck in the world.

* * *